"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

rms @ UBC

Table of Contents

Inspired by the informative and entertaining write-ups of Stephen Adler, most
relevantly "An Ode to
Richard Stallman" (LG #37) I
recently took it upon myself to document Stallman's foray into the
Great White North. First a brief introduction. I'm relatively new to
Linux - primarily a Windows and Unix user until about a year ago
thanks to the Linux box that I started using as a graduate student in
astronomy at the University of
Victoria. Since then I've been using Linux every day (and loving it!), while
developing a budding interest in the history of Linux and the free
software movement.

About a month ago, while checking out the VLUG links page I happen to stumble
across the linux.bc.ca website.
Just in time as it turns out, since Richard Stallman is scheduled to
talk on "Freedomware: The GNU/Linux System and the Free Software
Movement" in Vancouver at the University
of British Columbia on Thursday, September 23. As an added bonus, Tim
O'Reilly is speaking on Friday, so if I stay I'm thinking I'll get the
full spectrum of opinions on free software and documentation. Flash
forward to...

In typical Hayashi fashion, I've managed to make things interesting
from the get-go by sleeping in by an hour. Unfortunately, the life of
an astronomy grad student has done nothing to improve my
predisposition towards getting up on time. Oh well, it's not the end
of the world: I'll just have to take the 12:00 noon ferry to the
mainland instead of the 11:00 as I'd planned. This still gives me
about two hours to get from the ferry terminal to UBC. Plenty of
time, but I decide to play it safe and take the coach that runs
directly from downtown Victoria, via the ferry, to downtown
Vancouver. Twice as expensive as public transit, but faster and half
as stressful since you don't have to worry about bus schedules,
transfers, correct change, etc. My anxiety level drops by half once
I'm in the lineup to board the coach with ticket in hand.

I start thinking ahead to Stallman's lecture this afternoon. I'm
pretty excited about going to see the man behind GNU, not to mention Emacs,
the greatest editor of all-time, ever. Maybe I'll even get to
meet the man afterwards... Ulp! From what I've read rms can be a
somewhat intimidating fellow. I can just imagine myself saying
something foolish to draw his ire. "GNU/Linux," I start repeating to
myself. "Not just `Linux,' `GNU/Linux'"!

Pretty
soon the bus is parked onboard the ferry and we're shuffled up to the passenger
decks. Normally I'm not a big fan of the ferry ride between Vancouver and
Victoria. Usually I'm traveling alone and just want to read or sleep but can
never find a quiet place to do either. There's always someone nearby talking
just loud enough to be a distraction. This time around it isn't that bad, though. I think the
key is to spend as much time as possible outside on deck. The morning clouds
are starting to burn off and the Gulf Islands can look quite spectacular under
a little sunshine. I sit down on a bench, eat a couple sandwiches and snap some
pics. Life is good.

The ferry hits land at about 1:40 and the
coach drops me off at Cambie and Broadway at 2:30 with plenty of time
to spare. I hop on the 99 B-line express that goes west to the
university. So there I am standing near the back, minding my own
business when I overhear the words "Red Hat" and "Debian" in a
conversation behind me. There's an empty seat next to one of the guys
talking so I grab it and ask if they're going to the Stallman
lecture. Turns out they are - they're comp sci students from nearby
Simon Fraser University (SFU). One
guy's got a 3 1/2'' floppy in his hand - hoping for an autograph
perhaps? He says it's a Linux boot disk with nethack on it. They seem
like pretty cool hacker-types and we end up chatting for the rest of
the bus ride.

We get off at UBC and after wandering around campus for a while we
finally arrive at Woodward IRC lecture hall 2. It's still fairly early
yet - there's only a handful of people scattered about the lecture
hall. We grab some centre seats about a dozen rows back. One of the
guys, Ryan, whips out a laptop, fires up Debian, and starts an
X-window session with fvwm as the window manager. (Later we watch in
horror as a guy near the front starts up Windows on his own laptop
("wanker"!)). They start playing some game with flying triangles
("bratwurst"?) and a command-line syntax that looks Lisp-like. After a
little hacking one of the guys gets a triangle to rotate. Cool!

Finally we catch our first glimpse of Stallman. He looks a lot less
imposing than I'd imagined him. (In my mind I'd pictured an immense
being with limbs like redwoods and a voice like thunder.) Despite his
reputation, I find later that he's surprisingly easy to talk to and
generally quite gracious, especially to people asking very basic
questions about GNU. He's constantly fiddling with his hair when he's
answering a question (looks like he's checking for loose ends) but as
long as you have something interesting to say, you have his full
attention.

The lecture gets underway, and I start scribbling. (Unlike Stephen
Adler, I'm forced to take notes the old fashioned way, with pen and
paper. On the bright side, I don't have to worry about spilling coffee
on my non-existent laptop.) Dr. Rabab Ward, director of the Center for Integrated Computer Systems
Research (co-sponsors of the event along with VanLUG) introduces
comp sci prof Ed Casas who starts telling us about rms until Stallman
complains "You're giving my whole speech!" Thus, the introduction gets
cut short and at last rms steps up to the podium.

The first half of his talk is a retelling of the history of the GNU
Project that appears on the GNU website, so I won't bother with a
detailed recap. (A complete transcript of my notes appears here.) Even though it was a familiar tale (for
me anyway) it was cool to hear it from the man himself. Along the way
he extolled the virtues of living cheaply and not being "a slave of a
desperate need for money" with expensive habits like "stamps, art, and
children!" I guess we won't be seeing any little Stallmans running
around anytime soon... He went on to say that as president of the Free Software Foundation
(FSF), he decided not to take a cut of the money
raised by FSF, since paying himself would be "like throwing money
away, because we can get Stallman to work for nothing." So if we like
the software he has helped to develop, we could either donate money to
FSF or to Stallman himself. Hmm...

In explaining the four freedoms
which define free software, he compared new measures being adopted
by the US government to deter prohibited copying to those employed by
the Russian establishment, and went on to conclude that "nothing but
a police state can possibly stamp out freedom 2 [the freedom to
redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour]." After describing
freedom 3, the freedom to publish an improved version of a program, he
mentioned that the Open Source
Initiative (OSI) promotes free software by concentrating solely on
the benefits of freedom 3. Stallman believes that in doing
this OSI is leaving out the most important things GNU has to say, and
that, while GNU and OSI are allies with respect to software
development, they remain "rivals in the domain of philosophical
debate." He also talked about how software can be free for some users
and not others, using the licensing of the X Window System as an
example (see "The X Windows trap").

He devoted the last part of his talk to issues which must be addressed
in order to ensure the continued existence of a free OS five years
down the road. First up: the problem of hardware products whose
specifications are kept secret by their manufacturers and that can only
be operated via proprietary software. The solution to this problem is
twofold: 1) discourage people from purchasing hardware that is not
supported by free software, and 2) reverse engineer the non-free
drivers and write free ones. Secondly, he talked about the pitfall
represented by using non-free libraries as a basis for free software
development. The obvious example of this is the Qt GUI toolkit used by
KDE. GNU is
attacking this problem by developing the GNOME desktop environment, as well as
the FreeQT toolkit Harmony.
Again, Stallman stressed that it is easy to stay out of this trap if
you recognize it as an issue. Finally, he made brief mention of the
dangers posed by patents, and the patenting of software features and
algorithms (e.g. the GIF patent held by
UNISYS).

Stallman concluded the lecture by arguing that the Linux community and
the Open Source movement endanger the future of free software by
failing to recognize the value of the freedom it affords. He cited
ads for proprietary software in Linux magazines as an example
of encouraging users to give up the freedom they've won by using a free
OS. In promoting the name `GNU-slash-Linux' over simply `Linux', his aim
is to not only give credit to the authors of the GNU software which
makes Linux possible, but also to raise awareness of the
philosophy of the GNU Project, perhaps causing users to think about the
value of freedom and maybe even inspiring them to defend the free software
community when it is endangered.

With that, Stallman opened the floor to questions, the first one being
whether he considers any circumstance legitimate justification to
write or sell proprietary software. Stallman answered with a succinct
"no," but pointed out that 90% of the software industry is about
developing custom software ("people don't load sloughware into a
microwave"). A guy sitting in front of me asked how programmers
would get paid if all software were free. Stallman said that getting
paid should be considered secondary to the more important issue of
"will people have freedom?" Once that is taken care of, programmers
can find new ways to earn a living, e.g. get paid to write free
software by companies like Red Hat, or sell
copies/support/documentation for free software like GNU.

Someone posed the fundamental question, "Is it ethical to redistribute
something that you're not allowed to redistribute?" Stallman replied
simply that the lesser of the two evils is to share with your
friend. The audience responded with a thunderous ovation. He went on
to say that there is a "war against journals" currently being waged in
academia. To fight scientific journals that claim sole rights to the
articles they publish, Stallman urged us to include the statement
"Permission is granted for verbatim copying of this work" on any
articles we submit for publication.

At this point Stallman took an extended break to sell GNU manuals,
give away stickers, and talk one-on-one with audience members. Of the
audience of about 200 people, dozens purchased Emacs and Make manuals
which rms patiently signed with his customary "Happy Hacking." (He was
noticeably quick to point out the "cheapskates" who asked for
signatures on the free FSF brochures that were also being
distributed.) This was followed by a final Q & A for the thirty or
forty hardcore hackers who had stuck around.

Someone made a comment about linking closed source objects into
Linux. Stallman said that Linus made a big mistake when he allowed
this to happen. There was a brief discussion of the "Look and Feel"
lawsuit which apparently resulted in a tie vote in the US Supreme
Court. Since then, industry seems to have lost interest in pursuing
it. Stallman, of course, was opposed to the idea of copyrighting an
interface. Someone asked the obligatory question about the state of
the GNU Hurd. He claimed that there is a working version, but that they
haven't yet taken full advantage of the architecture, and that no one
is currently working on it full-time. (Seems like the perfect
opportunity for a comp sci PhD thesis.) Near the end, a
sincere-sounding chap thanked rms for Emacs, and said that, in the
80's, he used to spend a lot of time staring at an Emacs
window. Stallman countered, "Does that mean you don't anymore? Emacs
misses you. Emacs needs you!" Hee-hee! Great stuff!

It's after 6:30 by this time and I'm getting hungry, not to mention I
was supposed to meet the friends I'm staying with at 6:00 (sorry
Trish!). Still, I'm hoping to work up the nerve to talk to Stallman and
maybe get a picture with him. Just when I'm thinking of taking off,
the questions die out and Stallman wraps up the Q & A. Some more
people are getting him to sign manuals, so I wait for an opening and
ask him if I could make a personal donation to him and not the FSF in
appreciation for creating GNU Emacs. He agrees (!) so I whip out $20
and get Ryan to take a couple pictures of this historic
transaction. Woo-hoo! My trip is now officially a success! I quickly
say goodbye to the guys from SFU and dash off to meet my friends at the
bookstore.

Thanks to the overcrowded Vancouver transit system, I arrive about 15
minutes into Tim O'Reilly's Friday morning talk on "Linux and Open
Source Business Models." As it turns out, I don't think I missed
much. O'Reilly's talk seems to be somewhat disorganized - a series of
loosely-connected thoughts and stories about the
software industry (here are my
notes). His main point seems to be that the open source and the web are
revolutionizing the software business (newsflash!) but when someone asks him
about open sourcing his company's publications, he claims that his hands are
tied by authors' royalty demands. He goes on to say that he wants to maximize
the amount of useful information his books provide. Seems to me the best way to
do that is to allow free access to their contents...

His words about not thinking in the `old frame' and adapting to the
'new paradigm' ring hollow considering that O'Reilly & Associates
continues to follow a traditional print publication business
model. Why not try something truly innovative like selling online
access to his books at a reduced price? He ends his talk by imploring
the audience to use the new era of Internet and open source to "find a
way for people to want to give you money." Not exactly "Ask not what
your country can do for you..." as far as inspirational messages
go... Afterwards a VanLUG guy mentions that it's O'Reilly day at the
University Bookstore (20% off all O'Reilly books), and O'Reilly plugs
a new book of UserFriendly cartoons that's coming out soon.

Unlike the Stallman lecture, there seems to be much less of a hacker
presence, somewhat understandably since this was a talk about business
models. After the moral conviction of Stallman's words yesterday, the
things O'Reilly had to say about the new frontier in the software
industry paled in comparison. Freedom is something you can laugh, cry,
or shake your fist in the air about. And the heart and soul of GNU is
a belief in helping others. In comparison, the business of making
money is a cold, logical affair that's not very conducive to exciting
peoples' passions. After the talk hardly anyone in the audience of
about 70 or 80 rushes the stage to talk to O'Reilly like they did
yesterday with rms.